Sunday, February 10, 2019

Rep. Chip Roy (R-TX) op-ed: The State of the Border

Mike Blake/Reuters
We are losing control, but we can fix this.
As the State of the Union approaches, I felt it was important to get a true and unfiltered “state of the border” from the great men and women of our Border Patrol (CBP). I was honored to join them — and my House colleague from Texas Dan Crenshaw — in the Rio Grande Valley (RGV) sector along our border this past week. The truth is that dangerous cartels exploiting our asylum laws increasingly control our borders even though we have the power to stop it.
What do we know? First, we know that along southern Texas in particular, the Gulf cartel controls illegal trafficking across the border. CBP estimates almost 400,000 individuals will cross our border this year in the RGV sector — of which close to 50 percent may not be apprehended. In many cases, agents will be alerted but not have the resources to apprehend the crossers — as the cartel runs a sophisticated, profit-driven operation to move them.
Each person who crosses pays a fee — a portion of which goes straight to the Gulf cartel, earning them well over $100 million in a year. Whatever the migrants or their families cannot afford, they end up having to “work off.” Indeed, even as we visited CBP, a stash house was discovered in Houston with 54 individuals who were being held hostage to pay off their “debt.”
Two 16-year-old boys I spoke to just a few yards from the Rio Grande explained how they had been held for a number of days to work to pay their way and slept in a park in Reynosa at night. When I asked them about girls who were traveling and whether they were forced into sex, they shuffled around and said not the girls they were with but some they knew in groups behind them. Some say the cartel protects girls to encourage more “for good business,” but even so, a large number are abused.
Read the rest from Rep. Chip Roy HERE.

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1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Don't suppose you will post any articles which include comments by Republican Rep Will Hurd. He knows more about the TX border than anyone, and he's against a border wall.

-Martha